Roald Dahl scores first number one in book chart

Roald Dahl has scored his first ever Official Top 50 number one, as World Book Day title The Great Mouse Plot (Puffin) leapfrogged Cavan Scott’s The Escape: Star Wars (Egmont). The Great Mouse Plot, illustrated by Quentin Blake, sold 32,096 copies for £32,096, according to Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market.

Despite being one of the world’s most beloved children’s authors, Dahl has only ever hit a high of second place in the Nielsen BookScan era before now. Roald Dahl’s Incredible Chocolate Box (Puffin), another World Book Day (WBD) title, sold 44,056 copies in its first week on sale in 2005, missing out on the number one spot by just 1,370 copies to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (Corgi). Since records began in 1998, Dahl’s books have sold in excess of 10m copies, worth over £55m.

He is the second children’s author to hit the number one spot posthumously within a year, after Terry Pratchett’s The Shepherd’s Crown (Doubleday Children’s) topped the chart last August. Other authors who have reached the top spot from beyond the grave include Jennifer Worth in 2012 with Call the Midwife (Phoenix), Stieg Larsson in spring 2010 with The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (Quercus), and Dr Robert Atkins with Dr Atkins’ New Diet Revolution (Vermillion) in 2003, all of whom spent four weeks as number one.

The previous number one The Escape: Star Wars slipped to second, suffering a 44% drop in volume, and became the first WBD number one to reign for just one week since 2009’s Winnie to the Rescue!/Yuck’s Rotten Joke Ha! Ha! Ha! (Oxford). Overall, the 10 WBD titles’ combined sales hit 211,348 copies, bringing their two-week total up to 530,638 copies. This is a 10.3% drop on 2015’s figures for the same period.

However, WBD titles held their own in the chart, with all 10 books hitting the top 16. Aside from The Great Mouse Plot leapfrogging The Escape, Mick Inkpen’s Kipper’s Visitor (Hodder Children’s) overtook Sue Hendra and Paul Linnet’s Supertato Hap-pea Ever After (Simon & Schuster) and Kes Gray’s Daisy and the Trouble with Jack (Red Fox), Cerrie Burnell’s Harper and the Sea of Secrets (Scholastic) and Jonathan Meres’ The Welcome to the World of Norm (Orchard) all climbed one place, en masse. Juno Dawson’s Spot the Difference (Hot Key) maintained 13th place for a second week, while Rainbow Rowell’s Kindred Sprits (Macmillan Children’s) dropped one place to 16th.

The only two non-children’s titles in the top 10, Mary Berry’s Foolproof Cooking (BBC) and Joe Wicks’ Lean in 15 (Bluebird), were also the two non-fiction number ones—Foolproof Cooking took the Hardback Non-Fiction title from the Ladybird Books for Grown-Ups title How it Works: The Mum (Michael Joseph), and Wicks spent a comfortable 11th week as Paperback Non-Fiction number one, selling over 7,000 copies more than second-placed James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life (Penguin). Lean in 15, having sold 519,342 copies since December, is now just 200 copies outside the top 10 biggest-selling non-fiction books of the decade so far.

Unsurprisingly, How it Works: The Mum suffered a bruising post-Mother’s Day nosedive, dropping 18 places to 20th and declining 82.8% in volume. However, if proof was ever needed that mums are more popular than hipsters, it now stands toe-to-toe with its fellow series title The Ladybird Book of the Hipster, which has been out since October—just 60 copies separate them.

Philippa Gregory’s The Taming of the Queen (Simon & Schuster) held the Mass Market Fiction number one for a third week running, and Jeffrey Archer’s Cometh the Hour (Macmillan) also spent a third week as Original Fiction number one, despite competition from L S Hilton’s much-hyped Maestra (Zaffre)—or, to give it its full title according to the metadata, Maestra: The Most Shocking Thriller You’ll Read This Year— which sold 4,731 copies in its first week of sale to hit second in Original Fiction and 37th place overall.